“Slowly breathe in
and out. Picture a bearded ISIS terrorist then release
the love energy. Imagine them dropping
all thoughts of bombs then watch as they place their hands in yours…..Show them
the love!”

Psychic says new world order will be up
and running.

Psychic says that
after Donald Trump’s November loss, he will retire like Howard Hughes to a
penthouse suite atop a large Las Vegas
casino. There never will be a wall.
Prophet says the feeling of relief after Trump’s defeat will last five
minuses because Hillary’s dragons will
surface.

Monday, July 25, 2016

ICON Magazine Theater July 2016

The SecretGarden (by Marsha Norman and Lucy
Simon and directed by Matt Pfeiffer) packed them at the Arden,
proof of the popularity of fantasy escapism, But does this musical really work?
The story of ten year old Mary Lennox (Bailey Ryon), a cantankerous girl who is
sent to live with her wealthy Uncle Archibald (Jeffrey Coon) after cholera
claims her parents, Rose (Sarah Gliko) and Albert (James Stabp), has the
perfect Disney ingredients: a haunted mansion, a secret garden, and a spoiled
prince type, the shut-in son of Uncle Archibald, little Colin (Hudson Orfe),
who thinks he’s growing a hunchback. Mary’s
life in the mansion is monitored by the strict house mistress, Mrs. Medlock, played
to the dour hilt by Sally Mercer. Life changes for Mary when she discovers the
key to the garden and Colin’s “off limits” bedchamber, where Archibald has him
locked up because of his eerie resemblance to his deceased wife. While Ryon is believable
as the contrarian Mary, her saucy attitude is so coquettish and unchildlike that
even her technical polish— every line is delivered with robotic perfection—comes
across as creepy. The story ends on a happy note when Mary manages to bring
Colin back to health, proving that when misery meets misery, good things
sometimes happen.

Playwright Lucas Hnath’s marvelous Hillary and Clinton at the SuzanneRobertsTheater
closed out PTC’s 2015-16 season. While this satiric
look at gender and power within the Clinton
marriage is supposed to take place in an alternate universe, most everything
that happens onstage would seem real to Clinton
watchers. The washed out ex-prez (John Procaccino) is presented as a tired,
bored-to-death retiree offering to help his wife (Alice M. Gatling) win the
2008 New Hampshire primary. Tension
builds as the complex intricacies of their marriage surface. Hillary refuses
Bill’s help campaigning but she’s conflicted, deferring to her mega-mouth,
Bill-hating campaign manager Mark, adequately played by Todd Cerveris. Gatling as Hillary is completely believable: she
shows the right amount of stubbornness and independence while segueing into more
vulnerable emotions, such as when she collapses on the hotel room bed after
hearing that she won New Hampshire
because Bill secretly campaigned for her. Procassino’s Clinton captures the spirit of a
man who has climbed life’s highest peak but who is now aimlessly wandering
around the mountain’s base. The play is a potpourri of Hillary witticisms and Bill philosophizing, the best being the latter’s admonition that Hillary
needs to appear less cold and show the public just how warm and fuzzy she is on
the inside.

What was playwright Young Jean
Lee thinking when she wrote Straight
White Men(Interact Theatre Company)? The play’s title indicates she was thinking
about race but only in a labeling sense, since the four men, Ed (Dan Kern) and
his three sons, Jake (Tim Dugan), Drew (Kevin Meehan) and Matt (Steven Rishard)
who celebrate Christmas together, are all white. The play’s straight label is also a misnomer
because for race or sexuality to be framed this way there should be thematic
follow up. The family banter that Lee creates might as well have been lifted
from the movie, Animal House. All
these immature sons do is slap one another around and dive into the furniture
while laughing at their own jokes. The highpoint occurs when Matt bursts into
tears, causing Drew to exclaim, “Is Matt gay?” Of course he’s not gay; he’s just a depressed
white straight guy, nothing that more diving into furniture and a dose of psychotropic
drugs won’t cure. Inappropriate audience laughter throughout the performance
got me thinking that it wasn’t Matt who needed psychotherapy, but the audience.

Sister Act at The Walnut Street Theatre
might seem like a tired has been, but
not this Riverside Theatre production, directed by Bernard Havard. Here’s Broadway at its finest, an intense
over the top razzle dazzle cacophony of song and dance that’s much funnier and
better than the Whoopi Goldberg original. Havard gives it a Philadelphia
setting, so we hear names Like Cardinal Krol and the Philadelphia Police
Department. Dan’yelle Williamson as Deloris Van Cartier, the racy girl who goes
undercover at Holy Angels Convent, has the talent of a Diana Ross, and the
numerous singing and dancing nuns are as polished as The Rockettes at
Rockefeller Center.

Friday, July 8, 2016

I’m standing on Aramingo
Avenue waiting for a bus when a guy passing on a
bicycle skids to a stop in front of me. The stranger takes off his helmet and
introduces himself: Anthony Campuzano, a Pew Fellow artist with work in the
Philadelphia Museum of Art and PAFA. He also tells me that he grew up in my
grandfather’s house at 40 W. Albemarle Street
in Lansdowne.

I do a double take
and check to see if I’ve been struck by lightning.

My grandfather, Frank V. Nickels was a Philadelphia
architect of some note (his papers are archived at the Athenaeum of
Philadelphia). He designed the house at 40 W. Albermarle Street
sometime in the early 1920s and sold the mansion to the Campuzano family
shortly before his death in 1985. The mansion was a place I visited many times
as a child. I can still recall its Old World charm: the museum
style oil paintings, wall tapestries, hand carved Chinese furniture, a Steinway
piano, shelves of books and an immense bust of Dante Alighieri on the high
living room fireplace.

Anthony tells me he’s been trying to track
me down for a while because he wants me to contribute to an exhibit, Beyond Cold Polished Stones, by artists
with ties to Lansdowne, currently at the 20/20 House. I agree to send him photos
of my grandmother in the living room of 40 West as well an original poem and
some items related to my grandfather’s architectural practice.

At the exhibit’s opening reception, I learn
that one of the legends of 20th Century America visited my grandfather sometime in 1936 or ’37. The
occasion was the negotiation of land rights for the proposed building of NazarethHospital in Northeast
Philadelphia.

Because my grandfather was hired by the
Archdiocese of Philadelphia to design Nazareth, he was asked to try to get an agreement of sale from
the owner of the land. Without land rights, the hospital could not be
built.

The owner of the land was the 6’4” tall Hollywood playboy and movie producer, Howard Hughes, who had made a name for
himself in 1928 when his comedy, “Two
Arabian Knights,” won an Oscar. Hughes
had also co-directed the 1930 film, “Hell’s
Angels,” a film about WWI combat pilots starring Jean Harlow. Hughes’ inherited
family wealth enabled him to buy all the combat planes used in the film. A
natural daredevil and pilot himself, Hughes took part in the filmed combat dog
fights in which 3 pilots died.

As Hollywood’s most eligible bachelor, the handsome Hughes had had
affairs with Katherine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, Joan Crawford, Rita Hayworth and
many others. In later years he had the habit of collecting beautiful women with
movie star aspirations. It was his habit to put them up in apartments or small
houses while paying their rent and daily expenses. Initially Hughes may have
shown a romantic interest in these women but over time this interest would wane.
Hughes was content to call them once a month as he continued to send them
checks, sometimes for years. He was also attracted to male stars like Cary
Grant and Randolph Scott but this part of his life was kept secret, given the
tenor of the times. In 1939, two years
after his meeting with my grandfather, he flew around the world and was honored
with a ticker tape parade in New York City.

Let’s go back to 1937 when Hughes piloted his
own plane to New
York and then to
Philadelphia’s NortheastAirport where my grandparents stood waiting for him on the
tarmac. My grandmother, Pauline Clavey Nickels, a former opera singer from Wilmington, was probably wearing one of her big hats, and no
doubt Frank was dressed in his herringbone best.

When Hughes arrived, pleasantries were
exchanged, and then the group went off to a meeting near the grounds of the
proposed hospital. What was said then can only be imagined. No doubt Frank and
Pauline were a little star struck, especially when Hughes accepted Frank’s
offer to go back to 40 West so that he could have a look at his proposed
hospital design.

I wonder if the group had lunch on the way
to the mansion. Did Pauline ask about Rita Hayworth, or did Hughes inquire
about the stern bust of Dante on Frank’s mantelpiece? Did Hughes let it slip
that in two years he planned an around the world solo flight? What I do know is
that both Howard Hughes and Frank Nickels were eccentrics (although grandfather
was not mad), so I’m sure there was an instant bond.

Frank,
one of four brothers and a sister, was born in 1891 to William Bartholomew and
Dorothy G. Nickels of Roxborough. As a young man he was already setting his own
style: he had a penchant for getting his shirts dry cleaned and then carrying
them on hangers on various local trolleys. In 1914, he graduated from Drexel
with a diploma in architecture and after that he established architectural
offices in CenterCity at 15 S. 21st Street, 225 S. Sydenham Street and later in the LandTitleBuilding. His
concentration was industrial and commercial projects, as well as schools and
churches for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia and in the Reading area.

Several years ago I had an opportunity to tour
two of his buildings, 1521 Spruce Street and the Frances Plaza Apartments at19th
and Lombard Streets. For many years
Frank partnered with architect C.J. Mitchell, whose papers are also archived at
the Athenaeum. Frank split with Mitchell when the latter challenged him in a
bid to design a school for Saint Philomena School in Lansdowne. Somebody who
knew grandfather told me that he never spoke to CJ again.

Frank
and Pauline Nickels raised three children, Frank, Thomas C (my father), and
Joan in the Albemarle mansion. Frank’s bonsai garden behind the mansion was
so famous that local Cub Scout Packs would organize tours of the space.

Both Hughes and Nickels were basically shy
men with loner tendencies. My grandfather was not a joiner. As far as I know he
never was a member of the Philadelphia AIA or the “must do” T Square Club, unlike CJ Mitchell who was a member of
both. Both men had a difficult time controlling their tempers.

At eight years of age while staying
overnight at the mansion I was kissing my grandparents goodnight when
grandfather suddenly pulled me close because he smelled something on my neck. That
‘something’ was grandmother’s talcum powder that I’d dusted myself with after
my evening bath. Grandfather sat me down in a high backed medieval looking
chair and proceeded to scold me for being “a sissy.” I didn’t know what a sissy
was; I just knew that I liked talcum powder. I had never seen grandfather angry
before. The event was so traumatic I was never able to rekindle an interest in
talcum powder after that.

When grandfather and Hughes met at 40 West, it’s
possible that they reviewed the Nazareth plans in the dining room at the long table for 16
situated under a chandelier.
Grandfather’s drafting room was on the second floor overlooking the
bonsai garden and carriage house, so perhaps he and Hughes retired there as
Pauline played a few bars of Chopin on the Steinway downstairs.

“Frank, I like your plans for Nazareth, I really do,” I can imagine Hughes saying. “The
design is modern with a touch of art deco and I like the way the building meets
the sky. There’s something about your design that reminds me of aviation. I’ll
tell you what, Frank. I’m going to give the Archdiocese of Philadelphia this land
for free. You can tell them that down at the Chancery…Now I’m going to fly off
to one of my kept women on the west coast.”

The
truth is, Hughes admired the hospital plans so much he gifted the land to the
Archdiocese at zero cost. Perhaps they sealed the deal with a drink, a toast of
port or a round of straight up Manhattans whipped up by Pauline at the cocktail
bar.

Grandfather must have told this story at Sunday
dinner parties or at Thanksgiving and Christmas years after Hughes had become a
recluse, living as a hermit on top of the Desert Inn Hotel Casino in Las Vegas
or jetting around the world to hole up in other darkened hotel rooms with his
ten inch long fingernails, and long gray hair and beard resembling the monks on
Mt. Athos.

What is amazing to me, however, is that not
long after Hughes’ visit to 40 West he opened the Howard Hughes Medical
Institute. But before that, in 1935, he designed the H1 Silver Bullet, the world’s
fastest racing airplane noted for its sleek modern look. As I checked out
images of the H1, I couldn’t help but think how the plane eerily reminded me of
NazarethHospital. How can a plane remind anyone of a hospital? Well, I
can only conclude by saying that the plane had a sleek modern look that
conjured up the “feeling” of art deco.

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About Me

I am a Philadelphia-based author/journalist, the author of nine published books, including: The Cliffs of Aries (1988), Two Novellas: Walking Water & After All This (1989), The Boy on the Bicycle (1991-1994), Manayunk (1997), Gay and Lesbian Philadelphia (2000), Tropic of Libra (2002), Out in History and Philadelphia Architecture (2005)and SPORE (2010). In 1990, Two Novellas was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and a Hugo Award. Winner of the 2005 Philadelphia AIA Lewis Mumford Two Novellas rewritten and retitled for Starbooks Press: Walking on Water & After All This, available as an e-book. Winner of the Philadelphia AIA 2005 Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism. I am currently the City Beat editor at ICON Magazine, a contributing editor/writer at The Weekly Press, and a weekly columnist (The Local Lens) for Philadelphia’s SPIRIT Community Newspapers. I am the Religion Editor for the Lambda Book Report, and have written for Philadelphia's Broad Street Review, The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News.
www.tnickels.net